This is the first stable release of version 3 Standalone. It's been a long time coming and a lot of work went into this version, even if it's not always visible. Of course, this is just the beginning of the v3 development cycle and there is more to come...

Plugins

Due to the recent and very late changes regarding the authentication and license management as well as the introduction of the film settings pin in the render target node, plugin developers still have to catch up and implement those changes, which means that the roll out of 3.00 versions of some plugins may take some time. I can assure you that the plugin developers are doing their best to get that done as soon as possible.

Also some of the new v3 features may not have been implemented yet in the plugins, because they take a lot of time or can't be implemented because there exists no infrastructure in the host application to generate any meaningful input data for a specific feature.

New features

A list of all the new features is provided in the new features post. The manual is continuously being updated and should already cover most of the changes.

Compared to 3.00 beta 4 nothing has changed with the exception of enabling the offline authentication. You can find more information about the offline authentication in the new features thread.

Licenses

To run 3.00 you need a v3 license. You can still run the 3.00 alpha and beta versions with a v2 license until the end of May. The current plan is that 3.00 alpha and beta versions will stop working on 1st June 2016. If the roll-out of non-beta 3.00 versions for all plugins that had a 3.00 beta version takes longer than expected we will extend this grace period.

With v3 licenses you can still use 1.xx and 2.xx versions of Octane, but v3 licenses cannot be deactivated via the OctaneLive web interface anymore, since they will be deactivated automatically by closing Octane or by signing out an offline authentication.

For more details about the new authentication and license system, please read the new features post.

CUDA requirements

Due to a CUDA compiler bug we had to switch to CUDA 7.5, which means on Windows and Linux you may need to update your NVIDIA graphics driver to a current version which supports at least CUDA 7.5. On Mac OSX you may have to update the CUDA driver for Mac to a current version supporting at least CUDA 7.5.

Known issues

We noticed that deep pixel rendering crashes the render kernels on Maxwell GPUs (compute model 5.x) if the scene contains volumes. We are still investigating, but it looks like a CUDA compiler bug. If it's a compiler issue, we will try to work around it, but it might take a while until we have found a solution for the issue.Update: OSX authentication might fail after license updates. Please refer to this post in case you run into any problems.Update 2: Error while initializing standalone "Could not store offline data". Please refer to this post for a temporary solution.